The Ministry of Health updated Thursday that it registered 3,947 new cases in the past 24 hours, almost three times the 1,418 daily cases registered a week ago.

About 136,000 tests were performed on Wednesday, and the positive rate was 2.93%, the highest rate in three months.

A total of 16,088 cases were registered over the past seven days, a 126.6% increase over the week before that.

94 patients are hospitalized in serious condition, 57 of them on life support. While these numbers are still low and manageable, the number of new patients admitted in the past week constitutes a 90.6% increase.

Professor Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and an expert on COVID-19 in Israel, noted that the current number of verified cases in the United Kingdom, which is deeply affected by the Omicron variant,  corresponds to about 20-25 thousand verified per day in Israel, when the population ratio is taken into consideration.

Israel register?? its peak in August with about 11,000 cases per day.

Israel is likely to get to the 20-25 thousand range in about two weeks, he warned,

“Much beyond that, we probably will not be able to measure with the number of tests we have at our disposal,” he noted.